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Finished map for a new novel: A Throne of Bones

I wanted to first thank all of the fine cartographers here for your inspiration and the tutorials. This is my first professional, published fantasy map. Nearly everything is hand drawn, scanned in, touched up in Photoshop, and then traced to vector in CorelDraw. The map took nearly a year to do as author didn’t know where certain locations would be until he had worked out the plot! It meant a lot of revisions all of the way until the day it was literally going to press. The map was not originally going to have screens in it and so it was drawn to be black and white. Just a few days before press I found out that it could be grayscale so there are just a few tones in it.

In Selenoth, the race of Man is on the ascendant. The ancient dragons sleep. The ghastly Witchkings are no more; their evil power destroyed by the courage of Men and the fearsome magic of the Elves. The Dwarves have retreated to the kingdoms of the Underdeep, the trolls hide in their mountains, and even the savage orc tribes have learned to dread the iron discipline of Amorr's mighty legions. But after four hundred years of mutual suspicion, the rivalry between two of the Houses Martial that rule the Amorran Senate threatens to turn violent, and unrest sparks rebellion throughout the imperial provinces. In the north, the barbarian reavers who have long plagued the coasts of the White Sea beg for the royal protection of the King of Savondir, as they flee a vicious race of wolf-demons. In the east, the war drums echo throughout the mountains as orcs and goblins gather in great numbers, summoned by their bestial gods.

And when the Most Holy and Sanctified Father is found dead in his bed, leaving the Ivory Throne of the Apostles unclaimed, the temptation to seize the Sacred College and wield Holy Mother Church as a weapon is more than some fallen souls can resist.

I am loath to criticize the work of other cartographers, but you map has touched upon a few of my major pet peeves when viewing maps for fiction. If your world has major roads connecting the cities, why are they not depicted? Rivers are a common means of travel or barriers to travel, or boundary markers, at least major rivers should be shown on a map of this type. Your scale bar assumes the people of this new world use the same forms of measurement for distance that we do, shows a strong lack of imagination on the author's part (or maybe you haven't read what he/she has written). Same goes to your depiction of a compass; it assumes they use north the same way we do.

You might want to try some of the mapping software that's out there, it should not take so long to create a simple map, unless the author of the book has no organizational or communicational skills, in which case the book probably won't be worth the reading.

Heh - I can't tell you how many times a project at work has turned a week of billable time into a year of calendar time, as the customer's requirements changed. Shooting at a moving target is SO much fun :-b...

But that looks like a totally appropriate amount of detail, especially for printing legibly on a book page. And that's assuming the printing is well done - I'm reading a 60-year-old book to my kids, with plentiful maps... that are simple reproductions of the early editions. It's like using a xerox of a fax :-b. in this day & age I wonder why any publisher would not provide online expanded versions of material that is hard to produce in enough detail on the page.